It’s to do with their “long” outlook. They’re thinking of when we’ll be in the five digits and looking back at the fours.
I get that. But obviously they never programmed in a language where string to int conversion routines interpret such a number as an octal number ... which is quite common.
Something that only understandable by the group of 50s scifi freaks that make this website, I think. Barely has any real meaning.